You donât know what goes through their heads. You can play as well as anybody but if the front office doesnât like you, then thatâs the way it is.'' â Eric Campbell

NEW YORK — In the winters, Eric Campbell shoveled driveways and entered data into computer logs. He was a substitute teacher at his old high school.

He was a baseball player doing the kind of work he hoped to never do again. Each day was a reminder of that.

For six years, Campbell had toiled in the Mets minor league system, slowly making his way up the organizational ladder. Unheralded, his climb was slow.

The hope of a major league opportunity flickered somewhere up ahead, but could be difficult to see. At times it seemed improbable. Doubt lingered like his stays in Single-A.

The memories seem quaint now. Once a marginal prospect, Campbell has morphed into a feel-good story for the Mets.

A 27-year-old rookie who had to convince his manager to plug him into the lineup two weeks into his professional career is now off to a start so hot, hitting .368, that Terry Collins is looking for ways to play him.

"You just don’t know," Campbell said. "You don’t know what goes through their heads. You can play as well as anybody but if the front office doesn’t like you, then that’s the way it is. I’ve just tried to show them the last couple of years that I’ve changed myself as a player and I can help them win. Finally, I guess I convinced them. I’m thankful they’ve given me the opportunity."

A third baseman at Boston College, he can now play six positions. When he leaves the clubhouse for the field, he brings along four gloves and a bat.

On the Mets, he has become a backup first baseman, a makeshift outfielder, a potential middle infielder, a right-handed bat off the bench, and even an emergency catcher. It is reflective of his versatility in the minor leagues.

That Campbell has reached the majors is a credit to a career defined by pragmatism. Even Collins, the Mets manager but formerly the franchise’s minor league field coordinator in 2010, could not have foreseen a corner infielder with little power and without blazing speed getting to this point.

"Because there was nothing that stuck out with Eric," Collins said. "He was always a decent hitter but nothing stuck out. He wasn’t like a fabulous infielder or fabulous — he just could play.

"He’s transformed his whole game."

A Jack of all trades

Before Campbell was drafted, Mik Aoki, his manager at Boston College and currently the manager at Notre Dame, told scouts to give him a chance as third baseman, his natural position, until he proved he could not play there. But after the Mets took Campbell in the eighth round of the 2008 Draft, he saw the future.

With David Wright at third, the Mets were set. That same year, the Mets drafted first baseman Ike Davis and a middle infielder in the first round. Campbell decided that an utility role would be his best chance to make the majors.

Two weeks into his career, unable to get much playing time at Single-A Brooklyn, he went to his manager, Edgardo Alfonzo, and asked to play the outfield. It would be one of four positions he played that year.

It was not unnatural for him. Campbell had grown up around baseball in Norwich, Conn. His father was an assistant coach at Norwich Free Academy, a high school, for 26 years. At a young age, Campbell would come to watch junior high and high school practices and take ground balls and fly balls, experimenting with each position.

After starting for four years there and excelling at Boston College, Campbell’s career stalled in the minors. As a draftee out of college, he was expected to rise quickly. Instead, he did not reach Double-A until his third professional season. And then he spent three years there.

He did not reach Triple-A until last year, where he hit over .300 over a full season for the first time in his career. This spring, he was invited to big league camp for the first time, too.

Though he never came close to walking away, Campbell was far from certain that a major league opportunity would come, "especially the last couple of years, when I did well and I didn’t get a callup.’’ If he had not gotten there this season, he would have become a free agent unless the club put him on a 40-man roster.

"I said maybe it wouldn’t happen with the Mets,’’ he said. "I’m going to play hard and if I became a free agent, then maybe another team takes notice. That’s all you can do. You never know who’s watching, just play hard for everybody."

Always, he kept a backup plan.

Following his first professional season and after others, Campbell returned to Norwich to work as a substitute teacher at Free Academy. His students recognized him, said John Iovino, his high school coach and still a teacher there, and were more interested in talking about how to hit a curveball than English and history.

So each winter Campbell gave hitting lessons. He returned to college to finish his communications degree. He helped his brother flip houses, shoveling snow while his brother plowed, growing out a beard and donning flannel shirts. He preferred this job over all others because it let him be outside.

This winter, he worked in computer programming, a task, he said, that "didn’t take any sort of genius."

But each diversion prompted him to work harder, Iovino says, because it reminded Campbell of what he did not want to do. Each second on the job drove him towards the big leagues, and after his job finished that day, he would train for the upcoming season.

"I never thought my baseball career was close to over so I never got serious about it," Campbell said. "If I stopped playing baseball I never would have forgiven myself if I never made the big leagues. If I stopped trying."

When he was finally called up by the Mets this month, after 661 games in the minors, it was a dream realized. Twenty members of his friends and family came out to see his first game, though, Iovino says, "It might have taken a year or two longer than we had hoped."

His two weeks with the club have gone as well as Campbell could have wished. Campbell has homered and made a game-saving catch. He has earned a fetching nickname, Soup, and become a fan favorite.